The site, marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps simply as "Lisheen", a diminutive of the Irish "lios" and loosely meaning "little fort" or "little enclosure", is in fact a ring-barrow: a prehistoric burial monument consisting of a low central mound surrounded by a fosse, which is a circular ditch, and an external earthen bank. The whole feature measures roughly twenty metres across, with the central mound itself only about four metres in diameter and the entire structure rising to just under a metre at its highest point. That modest scale is part of what makes ring-barrows easy to overlook; from a distance, the landform barely registers against the surrounding slope.

The site sits on a south-facing gradient, a positioning that recurs often in prehistoric funerary monuments, possibly for reasons of visibility or solar orientation, though that remains a matter of interpretation. A field wall, built at some point after the monument was already ancient, runs across the bank from the east, continuing through the south and around to the west, effectively overwriting part of the original earthwork with the practical geometry of later land division. The gaps visible at the north and south of the encircling bank are modern breaks rather than original entrances. McCaffrey noted the site in the early 1950s, and it was also referenced by Killanin and Duignan in their 1967 survey of Irish antiquities, suggesting it has been known to researchers for some decades without ever attracting the kind of attention given to more visually dramatic monuments.